Image above: Sarah put together her half of the office in a fit of energy over the course of one day. Since they can’t paint their apartment, Sarah relies on punches of color, such as the “Oh What Fun!” art she found at a thrift store. “It says how I feel about my work.” The desk was cobbled together with IKEA pieces. The chair was a gift.

“The goal all along was to figure out how to make the house feel as wide as possible while preserving as much as possible,” Sam echoes. “The original details are actually quite grand, so we wanted to show them off as much as possible. Removing the wall between the front parlor and the original library (now kitchen) transformed the whole house. It exposed the central staircase which deserves to be seen. And Sarah’s design truly maximizes every square inch of space there is.”

Nestled down a country road, past oak trees, off the road and out of view from anyone passing by, sits a home built from the ground up, for and by homeowners and artists, Vivian and Walter Neill. Also on the large, wooded property is the blacksmith studio of homeowner Walter, a full chicken coop, and the art gallery that the Neill’s run together, Oxford Treehouse Gallery.